Seat No.: Enrolment
GUJARAT TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
MBA (PART TIME) SEMESTER 01 EXAMINATION SUMMER-2018
Subject Code: 3519904 Date: 02/05/2018
Subject Name: Organizational Behavior
Time: 10:30 AM To 01:30 PM Total Marks: 70
Instructions:
1. Attempt all questions.
2. Make suitable assumptions wherever necessary.
3. Figures to the right indicate full marks.
Q.1 Define following terms. 14
1. Expert power
2. Group think
3. Narcissism
4. Availability Bias
5. Workplace spirituality
6. Mach
7. Charisma
Q.2 Discuss the various elements of the Perception process. Discuss how each of 07
these elements play a very important role in creating accurate perceptions.
Q.2 'The process is begun with one party perceive that another party has negatively 07
affected' justify with outcomes.
OR
Q.2 "The cognitive evaluation theory is contradictory to reinforcement and 07
expectancy theories." Do you agree or disagree? Explain.
Q.3 Does Behavior Always Follow from Attitudes? Comment 07
Q.3 Explain the Concept of Johari Window. 07
OR
Q.3 Explain the various type of Teams with suitable examples. 07
Q.3 Define the term Leadership and explain Transactional Vs. Transformational. 07
Q.4 'The capacity of person, team department or organization to influence others' 07
justify with sources.
Q.4 What are the differences between distributive and integrative bargaining?
OR
Q.4 What are the four main approaches to managing organizational change? 07
Q.4 What is the rational model of decision making? How it is different from bounded 07
rationality and intuition?
Q.5 Read the case and give below answers. 14
Though it may seem impartially obvious that receiving praise and recognition from one's
company is a motivating experience, glumly many companies are failing miserably when
it comes to saying "thanks" to their employees. According to a recent report by Blessing White Inc., 24 percent of Indian workers are highly disengaged, meaning that they couldn't care less about their organization. Employee recognition programs, which became more popular as the world economy shifted from industrial to knowledge-based, can be an effective way to motivate employees and make them feel valued. In many cases, however, recognition programs are doing "more harm than good" according to Curt Coffman, global practice leader at Gallup.
Take Ko, a 50-year-old former employee of a dot-com in California. Her company proudly instituted a rewards program designed to motivate employees. What were the rewards for a job well-done? Employees would receive a badge which read "U Done Good" and, each year, would receive a T-shirt as a means of annual recognition. Once an employee received 10 "U Done Good" badges, he or she could trade them in for something bigger and better—a paperweight. Ko states that she would have preferred a raise. was patronizing. There wasn't any deep thought involved in any of this." To make matters worse, she says, the badges were handed out arbitrarily and were not tied to performance. And what about those T-shirts? Ko states that the company instilled a strict dress code, so employees couldn't even wear the shirts if they wanted to. Needless to say, the employee recognition program seemed like an empty gesture rather than a motivator.
Even programs that provide employees with more expensive rewards can backfire, especially if the rewards are given insincerely. Employees may find more value in a sincere pat on the back than gifts from management that either are meaningless or aren't conveyed with respect or sincerity. However, sincere pats on the back may be hard to come by. Gallup's poll found that 61 percent of employees stated that they haven't received a sincere "thank you" from management in the past year. Findings such as these are troubling, as verbal rewards are not only inexpensive for companies to hand out but also are quick and easy to distribute. Of course, verbal rewards do need to be paired sometimes with tangible benefits that employees value—after all, money talks. In addition, when praising employees for a job well-done, managers need to ensure that the praise is given in conjunction with the specific accomplishment. In this way, employees may not only feel valued by their organization but will also know what actions to take to be rewarded in the future.
Questions:
If praising employees for doing a good job seems to be a fairly easy and obvious
motivational tool, why do you think companies and managers don't often do it?
As a manager, what steps would you take to motivate your employees after observing
them perform well?
OR
Q.5 Read the case and give below answers. 14
In ten years, Plant World had grown from a one-person venture into the largest nursery and landscaping business in its area. Its founder, Myta Ong, combined a lifelong interest in plants with a botany degree to provide a unique customer service. Ong had managed the company's growth so that even with twenty full-time employees working in six to eight crews, the organization culture was still as open, friendly, and personal as it had been when her only "employees" were friends who would volunteer to help her move a heavy tree.
To maintain that atmosphere, Ong involved herself increasingly with people and less with plants as the company grew. With hundreds of customers and scores of jobs at any one time, she could no longer say without hesitation whether she had a dozen arborvitae bushes in stock or when Mrs. Carnack's estate would need a new load of bark mulch. But she knew when Rose had been up all night with her baby, when Gary was likely to be late because he had driven to see his sick father over the weekend, and how to deal with Ellen when she was depressed because of her boyfriend's behavior. She kept track of the birthdays of every employee and even those of their children. She was up every morning by five-thirty arranging schedules so that John could get his son out of daycare at four o'clock and Martina could be back in town for her afternoon high school equivalency classes.
Paying all this attention to employees may have led Ong to make a single bad business decision that almost destroyed the company. She provided extensive landscaping to a new mall on credit, and when the mall never opened and its owners went bankrupt, Plant World found itself in deep trouble. The company had virtually no cash and had to pay off the bills for the mall plants, most of which were not even salvageable.
One Friday, Ong called a meeting with her employees and leveled with them: either they would not get paid for a month or Plant World would fold. The news hit the employees hard. Many counted on the Friday paycheck to buy groceries for the week. The local unemployment rate was low, however, and they knew they could find other jobs.
But as they looked around, they wondered whether they could ever find this kind of job. Sure, the pay was not the greatest, but the tears in the eyes of some workers were not over pay or personal hardship; they were for Ong, her dream, and her difficulties. They never thought of her as the boss or called her anything but "Myta." And leaving the group would not be just a matter of saying good-bye to fellow employees. If Bernice left, the company softball team would lose its best pitcher, and the Sunday game was the height of everyone's week. Where else would they find people who spent much of the weekend working on the best puns with which to assail one another on Monday morning? At how many offices
would everyone show up twenty minutes before starting time just to catch up with friends on other crews? What other boss would really understand when you simply said, "I don't have a doctor's appointment, I just need the afternoon off"?
Ong gave her employees the weekend to think over their decision: whether to take their pay and look for another job or to dig into their savings and go on working. Knowing it would be hard for them to quit, she told them they did not have to face her on Monday; if they did not show up, she would send them their checks. But when she arrived at seven-forty Monday morning, she found the entire group already there, ready to work even harder to pull the company through. They were even trying to top one another with puns about being "mall-contents."
Questions:
How would you describe the organization culture at Plant World?
How large can such a company get before it needs to change its culture and structure?